6 Vitamin Myths You Have to Stop Believing—and 2 Vitamins You Actually Do Need

Taking vitamins you don't need isn't just a waste of money—it could put your health at risk, too.

Myth: Anyone could benefit from a multivitamin

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Vitamin supplements came into vogue in the early 1900s, when it was difficult or impossible for most people to get a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. Back then, vitamin-deficiency diseases weren’t unheard-of: the bowed legs and deformed ribs of rickets (caused by a severe shortage of vitamin D) or the skin problems and mental confusion of pellagra (caused by a lack of the B vitamin niacin). But these days, you’re extremely unlikely to be seriously deficient if you eat an average American diet, if only because many packaged foods are vitamin-enriched. (Still, watch out for these silent signs of a vitamin deficiency.) Sure, most of us could do with a couple more daily servings of produce, but a multi doesn’t do a good job at substituting for those. “Multivitamins have maybe two dozen ingredients—but plants have hundreds of other useful compounds,” says Marian Neuhouser, PhD, of the cancer prevention program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. “If you just take a multivitamin, you’re missing lots of compounds that may be providing benefits.” Don’t miss these other 8 vitamins that are useless, if not dangerous.

Myth: A multivitamin can make up for a bad diet

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An insurance policy in a pill? If only it were so. One study in the Archives of Internal Medicine looked at findings from the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-term study of more than 160,000 midlife women. The data showed that multivitamin-takers are no healthier than those who don’t pop the pills, at least when it comes to the big diseases—cancer, heart disease, stroke. “Even women with poor diets weren’t helped by taking a multivitamin,” says study author Dr. Neuhouser. Here are 12 more vitamin mistakes you didn’t know you were making.

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8 Vitamin Secrets Doctors Tell Their Friends

Richard LaliberteJul 01

When physicians have heart-to-heart chats with their pals, their vitamin advice often differs from the medical standard.

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Clifford Rosen, MD, knows vitamin D: He was part of an Institute of Medicine committee that recently set recommendations for the “sunshine vitamin.” So he’s astounded when he learns that friends are popping as much as 5,000 IU of the vitamin each day—far higher than the 4,000 IU established as the safe upper limit. “Probably 80 percent of the people I know take vitamin D,” says Dr. Rosen, who directs the Center for Clinical and Translational Research at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough, Maine. “When I ask them why, they say, ‘It’s not harmful.’ But that’s not necessarily true.” Thinking about popping a vitamin D? Read this first.

In fact, the latest research in vitamin science suggests that many previously lauded supplements may be riskier than once thought. And dangers may be greater for those who are savviest about nutrition. “People who take supplements tend to eat better and have higher nutrient intakes than people who don’t,” says Paul R. Thomas, EdD, RD, scientific consultant at the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Dietary Supplements. “Adding supplements on top of a healthy diet increases the risk of getting more than you need.”

Yet it’s tough to judge the value of supplements when news headlines seesaw between recommendations and warnings. So we asked some of the nation’s top supplement experts a simple question: What advice do you give your friends and family about vitamins? Their answers may make you rethink what’s in your medicine cabinet.